Coffee House Shots
What is going on with Joe Biden?
Get three month's spectator now for just three pounds. Go to spectator.co.uk/trial. Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm Natasha Fros and I'm joined by Freddie Gray and Kate Andrews. And today, because a lot of people are talking about American politics at the moment, we're going to talk about American politics. This week, there has been mounting pressure for Biden to resign. He is currently isolating with COVID. Freddie, where are we at with this? Because there was a lot of talk it could happen this weekend. Well, apparently Joe Biden is pretty sick. His advisors, who are usually very keen to make out his fine, have said he sounds terrible. But they're very keen to stress that's because he's sick. It's not because of anything else. The latest news seems to be a kind of pushback from team Biden. One of his advisors said that AIDS and so on, they've organised a meeting. And he said to them and there was a phone call and he said to them, don't watch cable news. Don't listen to all the chatter implying we're still in this fight. And I think the close circle around Biden feel that there has been a kind of attempt to push Biden out through the media without actually him agreeing to it. There were lots of reports in the last few days that Biden had become more open to the idea of standing down. Certainly the pressure on him from senior Democrats increased. Nancy Pelosi seems to be playing quite a big part in it. But the latest is that Biden remains defiant in spite of the fact his party is increasingly against him. How sustainable this is, it's hard to say. I mean, the key point is Joe Biden is like the pope of the Democratic Party. And if he doesn't decide to stand down or to not run for reelection, then it's very hard to see how he goes short of another intervention from from the Lord Almighty. And Kate, should he go, what are we looking at here? I mean, there's a lot of people coalescing around Kamala Harris, is that right? You now have dozens of Democrat representatives on the record suggesting not maybe so bluntly that Joe Biden should go, but certainly that he's not up to the task and that the Democrat Party is going to suffer if he remains at the top of the ticket. People like Nancy Pelosi, as Fred said, the former speaker of the House behind the scenes, seem to be quite active, although they have, you know, somewhat denied that as well. So they're clearly trying to still handle this in a gentle manner because ultimately they need Joe Biden to say that he doesn't want to be the candidate anymore. He did give himself a bit of wiggle room not too long ago, saying, if I had a serious medical condition, I would reconsider. The difficulty is that it may be a box-taking exercise as far as American politics go, but Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, that ticket has a mandate from Democrats in the primaries to be the candidate. And I think what you are seeing now is a lot of chatter about how quickly could they get another candidate? And whilst there are lots of questions about that, you'll find different lawyers telling you different things. It doesn't have to be Kamala Harris. It doesn't have to be the vice president. It could be anybody depending on how they want to handle the convention. I think what you are seeing is a lot of growing talk around the vice president. I think a lot of people think that's how you keep most of the money. People think that it's how you just have an easy answer to what's been going on. And then you have the spinners who will tell you that she's going to bring lots of life and enthusiasm back to the Democrat party and may really be able to go head to head with Donald Trump and the polls now and in years past always suggest otherwise Kamala Harris often struggles to pull better than Joe Biden. In fact, her poll numbers very often have been worse, but that just shows you the existential crisis that the Democrat party is having that they they used to, you know, even a year ago behind closed doors, think to themselves, there's no way that Kamala Harris can be the candidate. Now she might be their saving grace and that that just shows you how serious the situation has become. Yeah, I just add to that that I do think the polling recently does feel a bit cooked up to make Kamala look as though she's more popular than Joe Biden. The point about Biden is that he has a coalition and he has, you know, 80 million people voted for him in 2020. Obviously, a lot of Republicans dispute that 80 million people actually did, but the fact is he has a large base of support, which even though a lot of those voters seem to be giving up on him and they're very concerned about him, they do they can he can fall back on a kind of coalition. Kamala Harris is an unknown in that we just don't know the only time she's run for president, it was a disaster and she pulled out before the race really began. The latest word on Harris in terms of what's going on with Joe Biden is that she's urged everyone to focus on winning, i.e. to not get caught up in the chat. So Kamala Harris for now, publicly at least, or even in calls where she could have, you know, sort of joined in the doubters as far as Joe Biden's concerned. So now she seems to be being pretty loyal. That might be because her and Biden have an agreement about what happens if Biden wins, because I don't think many people think Joe Biden is going to serve the full second term. OK, you've been writing this morning about J.D. Vance Trump's new vice president nominee and some of the policies he might promote for the Republican party. Could you tell us about those and how much they are in line with Trump's policies? Look, what J.D. Vance and Donald Trump have most in common and what Donald Trump most wants to highlight is how much they both love Donald Trump. So I think, you know, more than public policy, more than ability to deliver a good speech, more than popularity, what J.D. Vance is really bringing to the ticket is that journey from never Trumper to Trump enthusiast, mag enthusiast, which, you know, I think is part of Donald Trump trying to replay the past two elections. He he wants people to say they were wrong. He wants people to say that they they got it wrong. They voted wrong. And actually, we're desperate to have Donald Trump back. And I think J.D. Vance encompasses that perfectly, that narrative perfectly on policies. Interesting, because by selecting Vance, it shows that Trump is really leaning more into the protectionist side of things, especially on the economy, and on foreign policy, leaning far more into being isolationist, particularly when it comes to Ukraine. But what I found quite challenging, actually, is that you have J.D. Vance very recently, just in the past couple of months, talking about, you know, the merits of tariffs, the possibility of even higher taxes, if if it meant that you could push up native wages. And in Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention, you know, Trump likes to frame everything in the future by using the past, you know, how great it was back then, the man likes to exaggerate. But the emphasis was on actually very traditional Republican economic policy. He was talking about the tax cuts he delivered. He was talking about the deregulation that he delivered. He was talking about that sort of classic economic boom. And that, you know, that's the kind of thing that you do to appeal to quite traditional parts of the Republican Party. I think one does have to ask just how far Trump's going to push it. It's, it's clear by picking Vance. He's, he's pick somebody who's going to lean in the more protectionist direction. When push comes to shove, is Donald Trump going to implement a 10% tariff? Is he going to have a huge tax on all imports and drastically increase the cost for consumers for American consumers? And is that really going to make them feel better off? I'm skeptical. A lot of the economists he still has around him are laugh or Larry Cudlow. He's a very free market people. They're going to be pushing back on the protectionist rhetoric. I don't think the economic policy is settled quite yet. And I do think, you know, we have to watch his around Trump because we know he can be influenced, but we also know that he might say one thing to one person in one room, and then quite a different thing to somebody else. So watching what Donald Trump says, where he to be elected again is probably the most important thing here. He can certainly change his mind. But I thought actually this week at the RNC, we got a pretty laissez-faire traditional kind of narrative from the former president. The question is if he hangs on to it. And Freddie, just looking at some of the other big names in the Republican Party, it doesn't feel too long ago that the big conversation was around Ron DeSantis versus Donald Trump. Obviously, there was Vivek Rameswamy. Nikki Haley has now said that she's backing Trump. Is there any remit for resistance to Donald Trump? I think there is no resistance anymore. I think it has been the Trump Party. The Republican Party has effectively been the Trump Party for some time now. That was blown away in the Republican primary this year. The last sort of vestiges of never Trumpism within the party would have been blown away. I think the shooting last weekend sort of has made him into kind of living martyr status. He is at an all-time high in terms of his popularity among Republicans. I think what's really going on is that a lot of people tried to dismiss his 2016 victory as a kind of freak, which in some ways it was. It was an extraordinary win. But by now, we're now in 2024. That's over the last eight years. Not just the party, but the move of American politics has turned in Trump's favor. I think J.D. Vance, obviously, is the potential successor to lead the Trumpist movement. You're seeing a dramatic shift being sort of confirmed in American politics. It will never be the same again. The Republican Party will never be the same again. Kate's quite right to point out that Trump talks about tax cuts. I think Trump has this amazing ability to bring with him the kind of tax cutters in the party and this new formal economically left-wing part of the party, which I suppose J.D. Vance represents. It'll be very interesting to see how that carries out in a second term if he is reelected. I think Trump believes he can be all things to all people. One of the more extraordinary things about him as a campaigner, and even as a president, is that he can be all things to a lot of people, a lot of the time. Very interesting. Thank you, Kate. Thank you, Freddie, and thanks for listening. [Music] (gentle music)